# 5HC recent bits *The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 22 Jan 2001* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *22 Jan 2001, 20:12* Talarican's burst of 5HC questions. > I was wondering if the selection of a 402 day year, pink sun, and so forth > had some significance, and perchance if even their astrometric unlikelihood > was intentional and in itself had some significance. (of course, I > originally embarked on this research intending to shed light on the question > of the planets' orbital periods and length of day and so forth) Right. Issues of error all put to one side: In a nutshell, I think 402 days means that the twin planets are at the outer edge of the ecosphere of their rather Sol-like star. > If lonely little Shadowchild Wolf terminated the Song of Bending Sky-Paths > that None May Come, why does the sun still look pink afterwards? This suggests (to me, at least) that pinkness has nothing to do with the disguise itself (although the fact that we cannot see a pink star within 20 light years might be taken as a clue that the cloaking is going on). The image-changing field (rather like a shape-changer, come to think of it) must begin a few AU out, making the star look like a dim M type of star. Re: Many Butterflies vs. Mary Butterflies. Since I originally knew only the Ace version, I thought it was/accepted "Many" and didn't think much about "Mary" at all, since the name isn't applied to any character. And the "Mary" thing is a puzzler: does this mean that Cedar Branches Waving and Seven Girls Waiting are really "Mary C.B.W." and "Mary S.G.W."? (Note those initials: my main reason for posting at all right now.) The brothers are both named "John," yet "John" doesn't really show up after their births--they are mainly known by their other name(s). These women, though, they have three names; and the names have strange parallels to each other (similar sounds, similar stress patterns). Then there's the grandmother's hidden name, which Sandwalker asks of his mother CBW, but she weeps and won't answer. (The "Mary/John" business when first presented seems to be the aboriginal response to Christianity brought by the Frenchmen. But "A Story" is set in the pre-contact time and has at least Johns [if not also a Mary, but certainly not Many Maries ], which either points to its "fictitious" nature as an anthropological romance, or to weird deeper truths. In any event, the notion that "Mary/John" comes with/after French contact is thrown into question (where there was never any question before). Sandwalker is on his vision quest, which will mark his transition from boy to man. His seemingly tangential dalliance with SGW is actually no tangent at all: she is proven to be fertile, she is in need of a hunter's bounty (weak boys die of hunger, hunters provide), he gives her honey (rather like manna in that desert environment), and then they make whoopie. So when he meets the Shadow Children he can boldly claim to be a man since he has had visions =and= he has been with a woman. But still, there's that weirdness of the girlfriend's name being like his mother's name (and different from, say, "Sweetmouth" or "Three Faces"). And how the girlfriend is a mother, father unknown. And they all are thrown into the pit. What makes me wonder about this bundle is the fact that in his "autobiographical" mode, VRT has this weird "mother caught me with the prostitute" thing, which might be either the root "reality" of which "A Story" is built to disquise (Freudian), or the opposite--it might be the "civilized gloss" to disguise the "A Story" reality (dissembler). Or something else again. That is: "mother caught me" might be real, "SGW" fantasy; "SGW" real, "mother caught me" fantasy (based upon these intersections of names, states of motherhood, being thrown together into the pit, etc.); or a blend. =mantis= --- ### Michael Straight *23 Jan 2001, 08:52 · follows Michael Andre-Driussi* >> On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, Michael Andre-Driussi wrote: >> If lonely little Shadowchild Wolf terminated the Song of Bending Sky-Paths >> that None May Come, why does the sun still look pink afterwards? > This suggests (to me, at least) that pinkness has nothing to do with the > disguise itself (although the fact that we cannot see a pink star within 20 > light years might be taken as a clue that the cloaking is going on). The > image-changing field (rather like a shape-changer, come to think of it) > must begin a few AU out, making the star look like a dim M type of star. Reading "A Story," I got the impression that the field was hiding St. Anne from an already-settled-by-humans St. Croix, not shielding the whole system from Earth. In the story, the humans show up almost instantly after Shadowchild terminates the song (which seems odd, even if they were just on the sister planet), and I also thought it odd that no one on St. Croix mentions St. Anne suddenly appearing out of nowhere - if that had happened, you'd expect it to be known as "the planet that suddenly appeared out of nowhere." On the other hand, I guess the astronomers might have thought they simply hadn't noticed it until then. Am I misinterpreting all this? -Rostrum ---